Perplexity AI Introduces Comet Plus: A New Revenue-Sharing Model for Publishers

Perplexity Will Share Revenue From AI Searches With Publishers

Artificial intelligence systems need content to produce results, and they've been criticized for not paying the people who wrote and edited that content. Now, Perplexity AI, the AI-powered search engine, is introducing Comet Plus. This new subscription tier will distribute revenue to publishing partners whenever readers use AI to glean or deliver journalistic content, the company said in a blog post on Monday. In the AI age, high-quality information is key, and Perplexity contends that publishers should be compensated for bringing AI users that content. According to Bloomberg, the company has allotted $42.5 million for the partner program and is currently looking for publishing partners. The tier costs users $5 a month but will be included for free to those with a Perplexity Pro or Max subscription. "To put it simply, AI gives a lot more power to users, who don't like spammy clickbait and never have," says Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity's head of communications, in a statement. "The right business model for the AI age should ensure publishers and journalists benefit from improving the internet." Perplexity says it'll compensate publishers in three ways: via human visits, search citations and agent actions. The first one is obvious: Whenever someone uses Perplexity to research content online, clicking out to a publishing partner will net some compensation. The second way is whenever Perplexity cites a piece of content in its AI summary, which will also activate revenue share. Lastly, whenever Perplexity's AI visits a publisher website to do some task on behalf of the user, that'll net compensation. Comet is also the name of Perplexity's new AI-powered web browser, which is currently being tested among a select group of users. Comet uses AI to summarize the websites you are browsing and can perform tasks on your behalf. With the rise of AI chatbots, publishers have become increasingly litigious regarding the use of their content. Because AI models are trained on online content, including material researched, written, edited and funded by publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and others, publishers feel they should be compensated. Publishers have filed multiple lawsuits against AI companies, including Perplexity and ChatGPT maker OpenAI. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) AI models need access to high-quality information to improve and continue being a one-stop shop for information. Publications are now inking licensing deals with AI companies to sell this content. Perplexity's move expands that to include data crawling for AI training and agentic use cases.

Perplexity has cooked up a new way to pay publishers for their content

Perplexity is launching a new revenue-sharing plan for publishers that will pay them every time its AI assistants use an article to answer a question, The Wall Street Journal reports. Perplexity is launching the plan (and partially paying for it) with a new Comet Plus subscription that gives subscribers access "to premium content from a group of trusted publishers and journalists." Comet Plus costs $5 per month, and based on Perplexity's description, it's primarily designed to account for the actions its Comet Agent (included in the Comet browser) takes on websites, which aren't considered in existing publisher deals. "When you ask Perplexity to synthesize recent coverage of an industry trend, that's indexed traffic," the company writes. "When Comet Assistant scans your calendar and suggests articles relevant to your day's meetings, that's agent traffic." The company's existing Publisher Program, which counts publications like TIME and Fortune as participants, shares ad revenue based on the traffic a Perplexity search is stealing away by providing a summary of an article. The money shared through Comet Plus will presumably account for what's lost when an AI agent visits a webpage on your behalf, zooming past ads you'd normally see or hear. Publishers will get 80 percent of the revenue of Comet Plus, according to Perplexity, with the remaining 20 percent allocated to "compute." The Wall Street Journal writes that Perplexity will initially pay participating publishers out of a "$42.5 million revenue pool" that will expand over time, presumably as sign-ups grow for Comet Plus, and the Comet web browser becomes available to more people. That starting sum likely takes into account Perplexity's existing Pro and Max subscribers, who will receive Comet Plus as part of their subscriptions and are paying into the revenue-sharing scheme by default. It sounds generous on its face, and maybe with a large enough volume of subscribers it will be, but 80 percent of $5 is $4. That's $4 that will presumably unlock unlimited access to a publication's entire library of content. Most newspapers charge anywhere from $20 to $30 per month to access all of their articles. Why would they settle for less? It's not clear if this plan replaces Perplexity's existing Publisher Program, or will exist alongside it. It's also hard to say if not paying for Comet Plus will change the quality of responses you receive in Comet or Perplexity. Engadget has contacted Perplexity for more information and will update this article if we hear back. Perplexity likely wouldn't be exploring new revenue-sharing plans if it hadn't already been caught plagiarizing articles in the first place. The company wants its agentic browser to be a success, and that ideally requires a certain amount of participation from the people who create the articles, images, and videos agents browse. It remains to be seen if Comet Plus is the kind of arrangement that will make publishers play ball.

Perplexity says its Comet Plus browser will save online journalism, but it's still an AI middleman

Perplexity enhanced its AI-powered Comet browser with a new $5 monthly subscription service called Comet Plus, which, at first glance, seems like Perplexity looked out at the bleak, ad-choked wasteland of modern digital publishing and decided it could offer something better to consumers and publishers. It's a simple pitch. With Comet Plus, you get AI access to premium news content, such as Gannett and Der Spiegel, with 80 percent of subscriber fees paid directly to those publishers. And Perplexity is paying publishers in three ways: when people visit a story from the browser, when their content is cited in a search answer, and when an AI agent uses their content to complete a task for you. The idea is that if content is valuable to us in that context, publishers should be paid for that value, and consumers should get something special. But I'm skeptical this model serves either the people creating the premium content or Comet Plus users. It feels like Comet Plus feeds the paywalled journalism into the AI sausage grinder just like any other content. Perhaps it's paying the farmer a fairer share instead of taking it outright. However, despite the inclusion of links and payment for people visiting the articles, it's hard to believe most people will consume the article and not just the digested result from the AI. Distilled answers engineered for brevity and speed and stripped of voice, structure, and context. All the things that made the writing worth paywalling to begin with. And it almost certainly won't encourage people to read the original work. In fact, it arguably gives them less reason to do so. People who prioritize efficiency and prefer bullet points to narratives might use the AI browser assistant to synthesize the top five articles on a subject instead of reading all five original sources, for instance. That's great for task completion. Terrible for the authors whose works are buried somewhere in the output. This is not some nostalgic plea to support writers regardless of quality. However, I won't pretend that this model addresses concerns about how AI treats work published online or the people who write it (and that's before considering how AI has rendered the em-dash and some of my other favorite style choices unusable, leading to unfair accusations). Comet Plus at least tries to address the problem, but it's a thin veneer of respectability that ignores the mess underneath. Perplexity argues that this is a fairer model than the current click-and-ads approach. I don't disagree. But if you genuinely want to rebuild it in a way that helps writers, then you have to design for visibility, not just monetization. And if you want people to care about human-written articles, stripping articles of context for simplistic short sentences won't help. No matter what Comet Plus might claim, it makes the same mistake every AI platform has made since 2022 in treating original work as a raw material to be mined, not an experience to be preserved. The cold truth is this: most people will never know whose work their AI assistant just summarized. They won't know the name of the Pulitzer winner or brilliant, if tired, freelancer cogitating on the future of publishing. They might get the facts, but they'll miss the point, even if they pay $5 a month to do so.

Perplexity AI to share search revenue with publishers

San Francisco (United States) (AFP) - Perplexity AI on Monday said it will begin paying out millions of dollars to media outlets as part of a new model for sharing search revenue with publishers. The company's media partners will soon get paid when their work is used by Perplexity's browser or AI assistant to satisfy queries or requests, according to the San Francisco-based startup. "We're compensating publishers in the model that's right for the AI age," the Perplexity team said in a blog post. The payouts will be administered via a subscription service to be rolled out in the coming months, dubbed Comet Plus, which the startup described as a program that ensures publishers and journalists benefit from new business models enabled by AI. A $42.5 million pool of money has been set aside to share with publishers and is expected to grow over time, according to Perplexity. "As the web has evolved beyond information to include knowledge, action, and opportunities, excellent content from publishers and journalists matters even more," the Perplexity team said. The company will charge a $5 monthly subscription for Comet Plus, which will be an added perk for those who already pay for premium versions of Perplexity. Perplexity is one of Silicon Valley's hottest startups, whose AI-powered search engine is often mentioned as a potential disruptor to Google. But the company has been targeted with lawsuits by media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, claiming the startup unfairly profits from their work. One suit accuses Perplexity of illegally copying and reproducing copyrighted content from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post to power its AI-driven "answer engine." A revenue-sharing model by Perplexity would be a peace offering to publishers and bolster its defenses against accusations of free-riding on their work. Unlike ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity's tool provides up-to-date answers that often include links to source materials, allowing users to verify information. And unlike a classic search engine, Perplexity provides ready-made answers on its webpage, making it unnecessary for users to click through to the source website. Google, meanwhile, has built powerful AI into its search engine and offers AI-generated summaries with query results. After a lawsuit by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in October, Perplexity criticized the "adversarial posture" of many media as "shortsighted, unnecessary, and self-defeating." They "prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll," it said at the time. "We should all be working together to offer people amazing new tools and build genuinely pie-expanding businesses."

Perplexity CEO says AI must pay publishers for content use

Perplexity, the AI-driven answer engine, is extending its revenue-sharing initiative to include content surfaced through its Comet web browser. This move builds on the program launched last year, aimed at compensating publishers whose content is utilized within Perplexity's AI platform. The expansion seeks to address concerns regarding the use of publisher content by AI systems. Perplexity has earmarked $42.5 million for distribution to publishers participating in the revenue-sharing program according to Bloomberg. This allocation intends to provide financial support to content creators whose work contributes to the functionality of the Comet browser and Perplexity's AI-driven services. The funding for these payouts originates from the newly introduced Comet Plus subscription. Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, stated, "AI is helping to create a better internet, but publishers still need to get paid. So we think this is actually the right solution, and we're happy to make adjustments along the way." His statement underscores the company's commitment to establishing a sustainable model for content compensation in the age of AI. Under the expanded program, publishers can generate revenue through several avenues. These include instances where Comet browser bots scrape content from their websites, when the browser's AI assistant presents content from these sites to users, and when the AI agent visits websites to perform specific actions. This multi-faceted approach aims to comprehensively capture the various ways in which publisher content contributes to the Perplexity ecosystem. The Comet Plus subscription, priced at $5 per month, serves as the funding mechanism for the revenue-sharing program. Subscribers to Comet Plus gain access to a curated selection of content from participating publishers, creating a direct link between user subscriptions and publisher compensation. While Perplexity has not disclosed the specific names of publishers currently participating in the program, Jessica Chan, Head of Publisher Partnerships at Perplexity, indicated that discussions are underway with existing partners such as Time and Fortune. These discussions suggest an ongoing effort to broaden the scope and impact of the revenue-sharing initiative. Chan described the existing web traffic-based revenue model as "an old model." She added, "We just want to create a new standard for compensation." This perspective highlights Perplexity's ambition to establish a more equitable and relevant compensation structure for publishers in the evolving digital landscape. The announcement of Perplexity's revenue-sharing program coincided with the filing of a lawsuit against the company by two Japanese newspaper publishers, Asahi Shimbun and Nikkei. The lawsuit, filed in the Tokyo District Court, alleges copyright infringement related to the reproduction of their articles. The publishers are seeking an injunction to prevent Perplexity from continuing to reproduce their copyrighted material. In addition to the injunction, each publishing house is seeking JPY 2.2 billion in damages.

Perplexity's Comet Plus Could Change How AI Search Pays Publishers - Phandroid

The rise of artificial intelligence has fundamentally transformed how we search for information online. Rather than clicking through endless links on Google, AI can now do the heavy lifting for us, distilling complex information into digestible summaries. But this convenience comes at a cost: traditional websites are losing traffic, and publishers are struggling to monetize their content. Perplexity's Comet Plus subscription plan might offer a solution to this growing problem. The $5 monthly service promises to compensate publishers fairly by addressing what the company identifies as three distinct types of internet traffic: human visits, search citations when AI summarizes articles, and agent actions when AI assistants automatically scan content on users' behalf. Publishers will receive 80 percent of revenue from Perplexity Comet Plus, with the company keeping 20 percent for compute costs. This represents the first compensation model that allocates revenue based on multiple traffic types beyond traditional webpage visits. The timing isn't coincidental. According to reports, Perplexity was sued in October by News Corp-owned publishers including The Wall Street Journal and New York Post over alleged unauthorized use of copyrighted material, while the BBC also threatened legal action demanding the company cease content scraping. The company has been aggressive in expansion efforts, even making a bold $34.5 billion offer to buy Chrome from Google earlier this year. Now with Comet browser aiming to replace Chrome, this revenue-sharing model could help legitimize its platform. For publishers exhausted by declining referral traffic, this new approach offers hope. Whether it succeeds depends on subscriber adoption and genuine publisher participation.

Perplexity AI to share search revenue with publishers - The Economic Times

Perplexity AI on Monday said it will begin paying out millions of dollars to media outlets as part of a new model for sharing search revenue with publishers. A revenue-sharing model by Perplexity would be a peace offering to publishers and bolster its defenses against accusations of free-riding on their work.Perplexity AI on Monday said it will begin paying out millions of dollars to media outlets as part of a new model for sharing search revenue with publishers. The company's media partners will soon get paid when their work is used by Perplexity's browser or AI assistant to satisfy queries or requests, according to the San Francisco-based startup. "We're compensating publishers in the model that's right for the AI age," the Perplexity team said in a blog post. The payouts will be administered via a subscription service to be rolled out in the coming months, dubbed Comet Plus, which the startup described as a program that ensures publishers and journalists benefit from new business models enabled by AI. A $42.5 million pool of money has been set aside to share with publishers and is expected to grow over time, according to Perplexity. "As the web has evolved beyond information to include knowledge, action, and opportunities, excellent content from publishers and journalists matters even more," the Perplexity team said. The company will charge a $5 monthly subscription for Comet Plus, which will be an added perk for those who already pay for premium versions of Perplexity. Perplexity is one of Silicon Valley's hottest startups, whose AI-powered search engine is often mentioned as a potential disruptor to Google. But the company has been targeted with lawsuits by media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, claiming the startup unfairly profits from their work. One suit accuses Perplexity of illegally copying and reproducing copyrighted content from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post to power its AI-driven "answer engine." A revenue-sharing model by Perplexity would be a peace offering to publishers and bolster its defenses against accusations of free-riding on their work. Unlike ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity's tool provides up-to-date answers that often include links to source materials, allowing users to verify information. And unlike a classic search engine, Perplexity provides ready-made answers on its webpage, making it unnecessary for users to click through to the source website. Google, meanwhile, has built powerful AI into its search engine and offers AI-generated summaries with query results. After a lawsuit by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in October, Perplexity criticized the "adversarial posture" of many media as "shortsighted, unnecessary, and self-defeating." They "prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll," it said at the time. "We should all be working together to offer people amazing new tools and build genuinely pie-expanding businesses."

Perplexity Launches Comet Plus

Perplexity wants to look after the publishers. As of now, the publishers online don't get any revenue for the data that they publish and is shared with the people via AI (artificial intelligence) search results. Perplexity has launched Comet Plus; this is a new susbcription tier for its agentic browser Comet. In this subscription, there's a revenue sharing model with the publishers. Now, whenever the website link of a publisher shows up during the search results, the publishers will also get to earn money. Read More - Apple and Jio Partnership, What Does it Entail The company has set aside about $42.5 million for participating publishers. The revenue share split will be 80-20, a similar approach taken by Apple News+. Platforms like Google, Meta, OpenAI have not done this yet. Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, said, "AI is helping to create a better internet, but publishers still need to get paid. So we think this is actually the right solution, and we're happy to make adjustments along the way." Read More - Apple Event Announced: Check Date and Timings for India This is a move that publishers online will appreciate. The company has looked after the interest of the content generators who do all the research and bring expert content to their platforms. This way, it creates a win-win scenario for everyone invovled. Platforms like Google also need to think of coming up with something like this. The AI browser of Perplexity, Comet is available to all the Pro subscribers of the platform. But in the future, Comet will be available for everyone, even the free users. Perplexity is working aggressively on enhancing its web browser. The company raised around $100 million at an $18 billion valuation last month. Comet has already received plenty of love from the market. It will be interesting to see who wins in the future - Google or Perplexity in the search business!

Perplexity Launches Subscription Program That Includes Revenue Sharing With Publishers | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. "Comet Plus transforms how publishers are compensated in the AI age," the company said in a Monday (Aug. 25) blog post. "As users demand a better internet in the age of AI, it's time for a business model to ensure that publishers and journalists benefit from their contributions to a better internet." Perplexity introduced its Comet AI-powered browser in July, saying the tool lets users answer questions and carry out tasks and research from a single interface. Bloomberg reported Monday that Perplexity has allocated $42.5 million for a revenue sharing program that compensates publishers when their content is used by its Comet browser or AI assistant. The program will use funds that come from Comet Plus and will deliver 80% of the revenue to publishers, with Perplexity getting the other 20%, the report said, citing an interview with Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. "AI is helping to create a better internet, but publishers still need to get paid," Srinivas said in the report. "Sowe think this is actually the right solution, and we're happy to make adjustments along the way." Media outlets have launched a series of legal actions against AI companies, accusing them of copyright infringement. At the same time, some AI companies and new publishers have formed partnerships that cover not only training data but also the search business. Perplexity was sued in October by two News Corp.-owned publishers -- The Wall Street Journal parent company Dow Jones and the New York Post -- that alleged that Perplexity did not respond to a letter in which they outlined their concerns about the company's use of their copyrighted material. Srinivas said at the time that Perplexity wanted to form revenue-sharing partnerships with news publishers and that the company could supply publishers with chatbots that would respond to users' queries on the publishers' websites, using their content to provide answers. "I don't think just licensing content is the only solution," Srinivas said in October. "Neither am I saying our publisher program is already there. I hope that more conversations will get us there." It was reported in June that the BBC threatened legal action against Perplexity, alleging that the AI startup's "default AI model" was trained using BBC material and demanding that it cease all scraping of its content, delete any copies used for AI development and propose financial compensation for the alleged copyright infringement.

Perplexity AI Pledges Payouts to Publishers Through New Browser Program | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. Chief Executive Officer Aravind Srinivas said the plan is intended to ensure that publishers benefit financially from AI-driven search. "AI is helping to create a better internet, but publishers still need to get paid," he said. The company's new approach comes as the media industry has clashed with artificial intelligence platforms like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews, which many publishers argue divert traffic away from their websites. Per Bloomberg, Jessica Chan, who leads publisher partnerships at Perplexity, argued that relying on page clicks is "an old model" and described the company's plan as a way to establish "a new standard for compensation." The program is tied to Perplexity's Comet browser and its AI assistant. Publishers will earn revenue when their work is surfaced in search results, drives web traffic, or assists in task completion. Funding for the payouts will come from Comet Plus, a new $5-per-month subscription that grants users access to a curated selection of publisher content. Publishers will retain 80% of the subscription revenue, with Perplexity taking the remaining share. According to Bloomberg, this model contrasts with the multimillion-dollar licensing deals struck between larger AI firms and major outlets, making Perplexity one of the first AI startups to tie payouts directly to content usage frequency. Read more: Perplexity Seeks Chrome Takeover as US Weighs Breaking Up Google Although Perplexity did not disclose which publishers are already onboard, the company has previously partnered with Time, the Los Angeles Times, and Fortune on ad-revenue-sharing initiatives. Still, the startup is also facing resistance. Forbes and Condé Nast have accused it of misusing content in AI-generated summaries without consent, and Perplexity recently failed in an attempt to dismiss a copyright case brought by Dow Jones and the New York Post. "We are confident AI companies will win all of these lawsuits," company spokesperson Jesse Dwyer said, noting the goal is to clarify the law quickly so "everyone can benefit from AI." Beyond publishing disputes, the company has also been criticized by Cloudflare Inc., which accused Perplexity of bypassing protective blocks to scrape website data. Srinivas has pushed back on those claims, saying its AI assistant does not engage in traditional web crawling but instead retrieves information from websites at the request of users. He argued that this activity differs significantly from the large-scale data collection employed to train AI systems. Perplexity, which raised $100 million last month at a valuation of $18 billion, has also made headlines with a bold $34.5 billion offer to acquire Google's Chrome browser, a deal floated as regulators weigh whether Google should divest the product. While some industry observers dismissed the proposal as unrealistic, Srinivas maintained that the company has serious financial backers. "We have yet to hear back from Google," he added.

Perplexity Offers Publishers 80% Revenue Share With Comet Plus

Perplexity announced Comet Plus, which gives users access to premium content from a group of publishers and journalists and shares a portion of the revenue with those publishers. "Subscribers of Comet Plus gain direct access to the sites and content of participating publishers, empower their AI assistants to complete tasks on those sites, and benefit from direct answers informed by the highest-quality content on the web," reads their blog post. The AI company says it will distribute 80% of revenue to participating publishers and retain 20% to cover its computing costs. Publishers interested in the program should email them at this address: [email protected]. The AI company says traditional models compensate only for human-driven traffic and that publishers remain stuck in the "primitive economics of clicks and pageviews." It argues that compensation models have not evolved and that Comet Plus addresses how publishers can earn revenue in the AI era. "It's time for a business model that ensures publishers and journalists benefit from their contributions to a better internet," the blog post says. Addressing the debate around bot-driven traffic and agent-driven traffic, Perplexity classified the traffic as: Explaining Agentic Traffic, Perplexity cited one use case: when Comet's AI assistant scans the user calendar and suggests articles relevant to the particular day's meetings, then it gets counted as agent traffic. Earlier, in July 2024, Perplexity announced a Publishers' Program where revenue is earned through the related questions feature. For example, brands can pay to display a particular follow-up question in Perplexity's interface. The first batch included publishers such as Time, Fortune, Entrepreneur, the Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel, and WordPress.com. It also provided API access, allowing websites to create custom-designed answer engines. However, the Financial Times sued Perplexity, alleging the AI company accessed premium content without permission. The New York Post also sued Perplexity for allegedly misusing its copyrighted content for training purposes. In a similar vein, OpenAI already has partnerships with over 20 media organisations and over 160 news outlets across 20 languages. Some popular publications under this program include The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, Vox Media, Time, Reuters, The Atlantic, and Axios. Meta also has a multi-year partnership with Reuters to give real-time answers to users from news content. The announcement to compensate the website owners follows Cloudflare's decision a few weeks ago to block Perplexity's verified bots from accessing content on certain websites. The cloud infrastructure company accused Perplexity of violating protocols in the sites' robots.txt file. A robots.txt file directs bots, like search engine crawlers, to the URLs they can access on a site. It also instructs them on which parts of the site to avoid and not to crawl. Perplexity responded to these accusations, arguing that its AI assistant, including the one on its Comet browser, is different from the traditional bots that crawl the web pages for indexing purposes. The AI company also said the principles of the open web should apply to AI agents as well, meaning unrestricted access to the internet and the right to ignore the robots.txt protocol.

Perplexity to give media giants share of AI search revenue -- as it...

Perplexity is launching a program to allow traditional media firms to collect a share of the revenue their articles generate for the AI platform - a move that looks like an attempt to fend off legal action from industry giants. The Jeff Bezos-backed startup has set aside $42.5 million to be distributed among publishers in the program, according to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. "AI is helping to create a better internet, but publishers still need to get paid," Srinivas told Bloomberg. "So we think this is actually the right solution, and we're happy to make adjustments along the way." Perplexity plans to fund the program with revenue from Comet Plus, its new subscription tier for the web browser. Comet Plus will cost $5 a month and create a curated selection of content from publishers partnered with Perplexity, similar to Apple's Apple News + offering, Srinivas said. Publishers will reap 80% of Comet Plus revenue, with Perplexity taking the rest. The media industry has been in an uproar over Google's AI-generated summaries, which appear at the top of Chrome search results, and OpenAI's ChatGPT, claiming the bots have slashed web traffic to their sites. Last week, a New York federal court denied Perplexity's bid to dismiss a lawsuit from News Corp. - which owns The Post and Dow Jones - accusing the AI startup of ripping off its copyrighted content. Forbes and Condé Nast have sent cease-and-desist letters to Perplexity, accusing it of using their content without permission. "We are confident AI companies will win all of these lawsuits," Perplexity spokesperson Jesse Dwyer told Bloomberg. "We look forward to settling the law on this early on, so that everyone can benefit from AI." Perplexity did not immediately respond to The Post's request for comment. Meanwhile, cybersecurity firm Cloudflare has also accused Perplexity of crawling the web and swiping data from websites by skirting around software blocks. Perplexity has argued that its AI assistant is not actively crawling the web, but instead accessing websites at a user's request, so it should have different rules to follow. When people use AI agents to "go and read something on their behalf, that's different from a web crawler," which downloads information to train new AI models, Srinivas said. Under the new program, publishers will earn money when their content receives traffic through Perplexity's Comet web browser, appears in queries on Comet or is used to complete tasks by Comet's AI assistant. Perplexity is working on its own AI-powered search engine as it hopes to rival Google's Chrome - which the Justice Department is pushing to be sold off due to antitrust concerns. Traditional media outlets that rely on web traffic and clicks to keep business afloat are operating with "an old model," said Jessica Chan, head of publisher partnerships at Perplexity. "We just want to create a new standard for compensation," she told Bloomberg. Several AI giants, including OpenAI and Google, have clinched multimillion dollar deals with publishers to license and distribute their content, but Perplexity is the first to offer up this revenue-share program. It is unknown which publishers have already signed up, though Chan said Perplexity is in talks with its previous partners - a group that includes Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times and Fortune magazine. Like many other AI startups, Perplexity has continued to raise massive amounts of funding - bringing in $100 million at an $18 billion valuation last month. It recently offered to pay $34.5 billion to take over Google's Chrome browser, in anticipation that the US government might force Google to sell the web tool to break up the company. Srinivas said the offer is a legitimate one, with "well-funded people who want to back us." He said Perplexity has not yet heard back from Google. Google did not immediately respond to The Post's request for comment.